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Decline of the West: Review of
Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre. Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge
Press, 1993.
John Ashbery, And the Stars were Shining. New York: FS&G, 1994.

"Martinique is not a Polynesian island," writes the Carib
bean writer and generally astute postcolonial theorist, Edouard
Glissant, thereby doing unto Polynesia what he (no doubt rightly)
claims others do to the Caribbean islands. "This is, however,
the belief of so many people who, given its reputation, would
love to go there for pleasure" (1). Yet the joke Glissant next
reports hearing from a Martinican political figure would strike a
chord for many residents of Hawaii who know better than to subscribe to the
Visitors' Bureau portrayal of the state as an
untroubled tourist paradise; "in the year 2100, tourists would be
invited by satellite advertisement to visit this island and gain
firsthand knowledge of 'what a colony was like in past centuries'" (1). Up
until 1959, the year Hawaii became a state, it
was a U.S. colony; many would argue that it still is.
Hawaii's dependent economy, whose focus has recently shifted
almost entirely to tourism, makes it more like than unlike Glissant's
Martinique. The link between Hawaii and the Caribbean
is--perhaps unbeknownst to Caribbeans--also cultural; Jawaiian
music, or reggae performed by Hawaii musicians, affirms the
(perhaps one-sided) emotional link between island regions; shortly after I
arrived in Hawaii four years ago, I was astonished to
hear a band of Hawaiian musicians singing earnestly about "the
lost children of Africa." Bob Marley's melodies, and many of his
political sentiments, can frequently be heard over Hawaii's
airwaves, and one group, Roots Natty Roots, writes lyrics in
Jamaican and not Hawaiian dialect.

Hawaii's culture, like that of Caribbean nations, is mixed:
here the influences are Asian and European, indigenous and African (insofar as
American culture is African American). Ronald
Takaki argues that "we can be certain that much of our society's
future will be influenced by which 'mirror' we choose to see
ourselves" (17). Thus Hawaii is seen increasingly as a model for
the multiculture that is developing in California and throughout
the United States, but the history of that multiculturalism is
replete with ironies similar to those found in the Caribbean.
For sugar planters imported workers from many different cultures,
not in order to bring them together in harmony, but to create a
rather primitive system of "checks and balances." As Takaki, who
himself grew up in Hawaii, reports: "The employers were systematically
developing an ethnically diverse labor force in order to
create division among their workers and reinforce management
control" (252).
Because Hawaii is a creole society, one can justifiably
translate Edward Kamau Brathwaite's description of Jamaica onto
the Hawaiian context: "'Creole' . . . presupposes a situation
where the society concerned is caught up 'in some kind of colonial
arrangement' with a metropolitan European power, on the one
hand, and a plantation arrangement on the other; and where the
society is multiracial but organized for the benefit of a minority of European
origin" (xv). Only when it became clear that
members of these various nationalities shared a grudge against
the planters did they begin to join together in unions, rather
than each striking on their own. The banding together of different ethnic
groups in unions was also a first step toward changing
the linguistic balance of power in Hawaii; Hawaiian pidgin (an
amalgam of English, Hawaiian, and Asian languages) grew out of
the planters' need to communicate demands to their workers. More
recently, however--and within the last 15 years, for the most
part--Hawaiian pidgin has been used in literature as a language
of difference and of resistance against the "mainland" or "dominant" culture of
the United States. Hawaii's literature has
increasingly been written in pidgin, following the example of
Milton Murayama's All I Asking for is My Body, originally self-published in
1975, a coming-of-age book about plantation life
leading up to the Second World War.

This "local" pidgin literature transmits many facets of
local culture more accurately than could standard English, which
students use in school. The African writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o
explains the significance of these two languages in another
similar context: "Thus a specific culture is not transmitted
through language in its universality but in its particularity as
the language of a specific community with a specific history.
Written literature and orature are the main means by which a
particular language transmits the images of the world contained
in the culture it carries" (15). Ngugi's emphasis on "orature"
dovetails with Glissant's contention that local Caribbean literatures
participate in a movement back from literate to oral
cultures. "I am not far from believing that the written is that
universalizing influence of Sameness," he writes, "whereas the
oral would be the organized manifestation of Diversity," or
multiculturalism. The literature of Hawaiian pidgin might well
be described as an "orature," especially since standard English
is the language of the schools and of business, pidgin that of
social and cultural interchanges.

The writing of what is called "local literature" is, at
least ostensibly, a form of resistance against Literature itself.
Just as Ngugi's son once thought that daffodils might be something like "little
fish in a lake" (in Harlow 37), Darrell Lum
humorously relates his difficulties as a child relating to elements of the myth
of Thanksgiving--its brown leaves, Puritan
black hats, and Indians whose side he rather thinks he would
take. As Ngugi writes in his essay "The Language of African
Literature," "Learning, for a colonial child, became a cerebral
activity and not an emotionally felt experience" and "the child
was now being exposed exclusively to a culture that was a product
of a world external to himself" (17). While Hawaii students have
no patent on disinterest in English or American literature, some
of their reasons for disinterest are, I think, different from
those of students (especially white students) in other places
I've taught.

Lois-Ann Yamanaka writes poetry exclusively in pidgin; it is
no accident that her first book is also published on tape, and
that her Honolulu readings attract up to several hundred listeners, for hers is
a spoken, not a written, language. Her speakers
are, in the main, adolescent girls who live in an intensely
"local" world infiltrated by the larger national culture. In her
poems, standard English is not a desirable language for self-expression but
becomes an upper-class affectation or power play;
it is, to twist J.L. Austin's term, a "speech act" in which the
speaker puts on the language as she might put on clothes, or
make-up, or a friend. In "Tita: Boyfriends," Yamanaka has Tita
describe her use of standard English to a linguistically less-sophisticated
friend. The effect of these few phrases of standard English in the poem (and in
Yamanaka's work generally) is
one of estrangement; the language sounds affected, strained, and
above all out of place, especially when she reads it aloud:

Richard wen' call me around 9:05 last night.
Nah, I talk real nice to him.
Tink I talk to him the way I talk to you?
You cannot let boys know your true self.

Here, this how I talk.
Hello, Richard. How are you?
Oh, I'm just fine. How's school?
My classes are just greeaat.
Oh, really. Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Oh, you're so funny.
Yes, me too, I love C and K.
Kalapana? Uh-huh, uh-huh. (42)
She then tells her friend how to make herself appealing to boys;
the pun on "act" is crucial because it makes clear that the
language of feeling (pidgin) is distinct from an artificial
language of putting on airs to impress others:

'cause you dunno how
for make your voice all nice,
your face all make-up,
your hair all smooth and ehu,
your clothes all low cut,
and your fingernails all long.
You dunno how for act.
And you, you just dunno how for please. (43)
Yamanaka's speakers share the prejudices of plantation life,
where even the layout of the sewage system emphasized a racial
hierarchy. She (not her characters!) has been criticized by
members of the Filipino community, for example, for poems like
the first in her collection, "Kala Gave Me Anykine Advice Especially About
Filipinos When I Moved to Pahala," which include the
stereotype of Filipino men (most of whom camp to Hawaii as
bachelors) as sexual predators:

No clip your toenails at night.
And no wear tight jeans or
Felix going follow you home with his blue Valiant
when you go plantation camp side past
the big banyan tree, past the sugar mill,
past the pile of bagasse, down your dirt road.
(The mock-up historical plantation in Waipahu, on Oahu, does
nothing to downplay such stereotypes; the Filipino house contains
a myriad of photos of sultry looking European actresses, whereas
the Portuguese house has pictures of Jesus and the Japanese
Buddhist house a modest altar. My guide, on showing us a Chinese
religious area, termed them "superstitious.") Tita's advice,
later in the book, concerns "Japs" and reveals the internalized
prejudice of a local Japanese adolescent (the term "local Japanese" refers to an
American of Japanese descent who grew up in
Hawaii):

I wish I had double eye. [like Caucasians]

I tell you, my next birtday,
when my madda ask me what I like,
I going tell her I like go Honolulu
for get one double eye operation. (33)

Everywhere in the book plantation life mimics "dominant"
American culture. As Glissant writes, "The pressure to imitate
is, perhaps, the most extreme form of violence that anyone can
inflict on a people; even more so when it assumes the agreement
(and even, the pleasure) of the mimetic society. This dialectic,
in fact, suppresses this form of violence under the guise of
pleasure" (46). Especially prevalent in Yamanaka's world is the
popular music of the 1960s and 1970s: in a poem set in the girls'
room, Tita describes "one new Edgar Winter book cover"; in "Tita:
User," she says angrily, "I no mo your Donny Osmond 8-track. / I
hate Down by the Lazy Riva. / And I no mo your Captain and Te-
nille tape either, / so get off it"; in "Prince PoPo, Prince
JiJi," the speaker says, "Us, we eat our corn beef hash patties
with rice / and watch Ed Sullivan"; Elton John music plays a part
in "Empty Heart"; and another poem is entitled, "My Eyes Adore
You." This last song becomes important in the story of a young
girl's first sexual experience; her friend, WillyJoe, translates
a line of the song into pidgin, "My eye adore you," as he croons
to her in his yellow Datsun (evidence of another kind of colonialism).

Yamanaka's poems pull no punches; typically, they tell
stories of sexual and verbal abuse from the point of view of
adolescent girls. Again, however, one needs to hear the poems as
well as read them. The most effective piece, to my mind, is
"Parts," a poem I've heard her read on more than one occasion.
It is organized according to body parts--the brain, the face, the
eye, the nostril, the foot, the mouth, the ass, the crack. At
each of the readings, the audience laughs at the first one or two
sections of the poem; part of the laughter has to do with the
fact of the poem's being in pidgin (an idea that is still new to
local listeners who went to school to Robert Frost and other
canonical Americans). Part is a reaction to the dramatic language of the pidgin
speaker:

I get one
splitting
headache.
No ask me questions.
And no move.
First one
who breathe
going get
one good whack
with the fly swatter.
You. Cook the rice.
You. Fry some spam. (65)
(A mainland audience might laugh at the reference to spam, which
is a popular foodstuff in the islands; the laughter here has
nothing to do with the food, an honest part of the local diet.)
At some point in the litany, however, the audience falls into an
ashamed silence. The voice--it is a mother's voice--gets louder
and more abusive, until words threaten to spill over into actual
violence. The poem's final section presents "advice from a 14-
year old friend" who counsels drug use as an antidote to psychic
pain. The audience's discomfort comes from the way in which the
poem forces it to participate in verbal abuse by finding the
rhetoric amusing; the child's pain is thus met both with empathy
and with horror at having participated in that abuse by taking it
so lightly.

"The grass is green and tall / like amber wave of grain,
cept green" (95) says a girl who has fled her violently abusive
mother and gone for solace to a friend, Bernie, who runs a taxidermy shop (a
shop that shows up frequently in the poems). The
poem ends with the girl looking down on the plantation camp and
her house: "Real small. / So small, I cover everything with my
hands / and no see nothing at all" (96). These references to
"America the Beautiful" and, less evidently, to "The Star-Spangled Banner,"
which depends so on the trope of seeing far, emphasize the strangeness, even
inappropriateness of the American myth
to Hawaii's plantation life. Fascinating then, to see that
Yamanaka's work has caught on not only in Hawaii, but also on the
mainland; Yamanaka has been widely published nationally. Strange
also to remark that she has been in some hot water at home, not
only for using ethnic stereotypes in her work (the idea of the
unreliable narrator is not universally accepted!), but also for
the pungency of her language and the sexual violence described in
the poems. Yamanaka, who herself teaches intermediate school
students and reads frequently to classes around the state, has
been asked to submit lists of her work that she intends to read,
so that administrators can request that she not read certain
poems. Certainly some of this may be simple prudery--and the
poems are strong--but much of it ironically engages a mechanism
of power that is attempting to perpetuate itself, and silence a
local language that has often been officially censored in the
past. Behind Yamanaka's loud voices, though, are the sounds of
reason and tolerance aiming to make their way through the din, as
I hope school administrators, teachers, and students will soon
realize.

Whatever the thematic limitations of Yamanaka's work, and I
confess to a certain weariness with her adolescent speakers, it
engages crucial issues, not just for Hawaii, but for the nation
as it reluctantly becomes a multicultural society. The pain of
this transformation--pain that is often self-inflicted--culminates in Saturday
Night at the Pahala Theatre, in a narrative
about lovers who burn their own names on their backs with
sparklers. After this act of curiously self-affirming mutual
mutilation, in which words do literally become flesh, the female
speaker has the book's last words. Surely this act reflects the
ambivalences of pidgin speakers toward writing; if the act of
naming has traditionally belonged to a cultural elite (such as
teachers), then the act of self-naming is especially difficult
and painful. But the last lines of the poem are most assuredly
spoken, not written:

I IS.
Ain't nobody
tell me
otherwise. (140)
I would not go so far as Glissant in imagining that we can here
see "a kind of revenge by oral language over written ones, in the
context of a global civilization of the nonwritten" (126). The
new orality, if it can be so termed, is also largely controlled
by the old powers that be (talking computers and MTV come to
mind). But Yamanaka's fresh and honest and spoken poetry is
important to Hawaii in its assertion of a local identity separate
from the national one. It may also help teach others outside
Hawaii about the pleasures and the pains of multicultural experience.

II.
And then there was the time
when you just joked coming
up to me, laid your wrist on
my shoulder and whispered the news about
the Romans: They'd won again,
and, what was more to the point, done so
in an era that surpassed the age of the dinosaurs
John Ashbery, "Dinosaur Country"

John Ashbery has, for several decades now, opened his work
up to a multitude of voices, although they all ultimately belong
to him, or to his voice, or (at the least) to a loosely defined
linguistic behavior that might be called Ashberian. I would like
to think that the success of Yamanaka's poems on the mainland
(not here, where Ashbery is, at best, ignored) is to some extent
due to Ashbery's strong lead block. But I find it more interesting to brood on
another question: how can a reading of Yamanaka
shed light on Ashbery's work? In what ways does her work open
his up to interpretation? Can we think of Ashbery, like Yamanaka, as an
"ethnic" voice, a participant in American multiculturalism?

The answer is yes. I read Ashbery's latest volume, And the
Stars Were Shining (at least in certain moods) as a colonial
allegory, manipulated by Ashbery to his own ends. This allegory
reads as follows: a famous American poet, wishing to write about
his own inevitable decline and fall, uses his own position as an
intellectual well-versed in European art, music and literature,
to tell his story. The decline of the west is embodied (or
disembodied) in the poet's decadence (or belatedness). In so
doing, he reveals the extent to which Americans are still colonized by Europe,
even as Europe ingests large quantities of
American culture. And so Ashbery appropriates his own appropriation: "What! Our
culture in its dotage! / Yet this very poem
refutes it," he proclaims. He becomes an odd colonist of the
colonial.

Ashbery's favorite trope is operatic; the title of his book,
for starters, comes from Puccini's Tosca, though it may also pun
on the star-spangled banner. But Ashbery's operatic allegory is
apparently different from Edward Said's. In writing of Verdi's
Aida, Edward Said argues that "Aida, like the opera form itself,
is a hybrid and radically impure work that belongs equally to the
history of culture and to the historical experience of overseas
domination," further, that "the embarrassment of Aida is finally
that it is not so much about but of imperial domination" (114).
Apparently different, that is, unless the decline of western
culture is somehow synonymous with its power. Western cultural
power manifests itself first in its most decadent form, or so I
thought recently when I looked off an ancient city wall in Xian,
China and caught sight of a large KFC billboard. Or when I
turned on my hotel TV and discovered MTV and CNN. In the postcolonial world,
there is often no way to tell what is "authentic"
and what imported; the confusions of the culture Yamanaka describes are evidence
of the mixing of outside and inside language
and cultures. (Local culture, it could be argued, is authentic
only insofar as it is hybrid; its resistances to dominant culture
are shot through with evidence of it. Dominant culture, then, is
authentic only insofar as it is able to absorb local cultures.)

Both Yamanaka and Ashbery refuse to assert one authenticity
against a myriad of imperial and imperious influences; Ashbery
positively revels in them. And, in so doing, he comes close to
the nineteenth century artist, as Said describes him: "The imperial culture
mirrors itself in the artist's role as imperial
creator" (116). In the aria "And the Stars Were Shining," Ashbery's title poem,
the dying Cavaradossi sings (and writes) his
farewell to Tosca: "And the stars were shining . . . the earth /
smelt sweet . . . the garden gate creaked . . . / and a footstep
brushed the sand." To which Ashbery offers a counter-song, one
that has a close brush with the aria's sad sentimentality;
there's more than a touch of hopelessness, too, mitigated only by
Ashbery's humor, his inconclusive final metaphor of life as the
tying of shoelaces:

Summer won't end in your lap,
nor are the stars more casual than usual.
Peace, quite, a dictionary--it was so important,
yet at the end nobody had any time for any of it.
It was as if all of it had never happened,
my shoelaces were untied, and--am I forgetting anything?
Whitman's barbaric American yawp owed a great deal to European
operas, but his "Song of Myself" was nonetheless written in a
distinctly American language. Ashbery, whose central subject is
valedictory, subsumes himself in that inheritance some 140 years
later, as if to suggest that the decadence of one tradition can
be used as an analogy for the poet's inevitable loss of voice.
Ashbery is not, like Eliot, seeking to put the eggshells of
tradition back together again, but he is using them (as perhaps
they are using him) toward an examination of America's continuing
status as a colonial, creole, culture. To put a more positive
spin on it, Ashbery points toward the existence of a world culture that is made
up of the fragments of national cultures.
Hence his comic apostrophe to the German historian in "The Decline of the West,"
some of which I've quoted earlier:

O Oswald, O Spengler, this is very sad to find!

What! Our culture in its dotage!
Yet this very poem refutes it,
springing up out of the collective unconscious
like a weasel through a grating. (46)
Whose is "our culture" in this case? Is the poet defending
western culture, or is he satirizing it? Perhaps he is simply
acknowledging his own status (this is best framed as a metaphor,
not as fact) as a "creole" writer: "What is it, spring? I can't /
/ help being a little European," he writes, after one of his many
allusions to opera (34). In this context it seems less odd to
use Dr. Johnson as an authority in a poem entitled, "Spotlight on
America": "Nothing like a big stranger in the dark / 'to concentrate the mind,'
as Dr. Johnson said" (51). The poem's next
reference is to those very American appurtenances, Venetian
blinds. In another of his opera poems, "On First Listening to
Schreker's Der Schatzgraeber," he positions himself between
Europe and the furthest reaches of the American empire, in words
that made this resident of Honolulu feel self-conscious:

The woman with the confused soul keeps calling.
Was gibt es? Now that you're in Honolulu you've got
to live it up
no matter what kind of grub they throw at you
on Main Street. O but my past is operatic
you see, the glitter, wind and shimmer,
all are in my bones. (58)
On first reading the liner notes to Der Schatzgraeber, one finds
Shreker's words on finishing it: "End of the opera. 12 November
1918 (on the day of the declaration of the German-Austrian Republic and the
union with the German Reich!)." It is, then, an
opera historically associated with the dissolution of the Habsburg empire--a
postcolonial piece, if only by a matter of
minutes.

With his usual wit, Ashbery piles on examples of sentences
that alternate between European (and occasionally Japanese)
references and American ones. At times he translates between
languages, or versions of them, as when he moves from American
"hood" to English "bonnet" (26) (Yamanaka's spelling of "theatre"
with a final English "re" seems relevant here) or quotes a French
idiomatic expression, "dirty as a comb" (8) or uses words like
"risible" that are more French than English (94). In "Dinosaur
Country" he mixes his English essayists with K rations:

["]Now I'm on an island in a self-engrossed river
with the selected essays of Addison and Steele
and enough K rations to last till Michaelmas
and its daisies, which, incidentally,
bloom only for me." (60)
And from the title poem:
"The kitchen's not such a bad place,
if it's sinks you're after. Sure, Caruso was singing
somewhere behind the padlocked velvet door,
but if we stay--no, linger--here, the problem
will reverse itself. Tom and Jerrys all around." (94)

I would suggest that Ashbery's use of references is not dissimilar to Yamanaka's
inclusion of Donny Osmond and Captain and
Tenille in her poems about plantation life. Like Yamanaka,
Ashbery acknowledges the influence of other (colonial) cultures
on his work and his language. The death of the western empires
that have given him language is analogous to his own loss of
language and self. In "Works on Paper I" he writes:
What will he do with it?
You're looking at an empire that has lost its clangor.
You get there by dying. (30)

I do not mean to draw too strict or close an analogy between
Yamanaka's and Ashbery's work, for there are certainly differences between the
relative situations of the speakers of their poems
(if Yamanaka's is a poor, abused, pidgin-speaking adolescent
girl, then Ashbery's is an immensely learned, witty, middle-class, gay white man
who rather enjoys much of his predicament).
The difference then, is one of class, as well as gender. But it
is also crucial to note that their languages are deployed for
different reasons; Yamanaka, especially through her use of
pidgin, resists inclusion in the (admittedly fluid) canon of
American Literature. Of course, that very resistance may lead to
her inclusion in future anthologies. Ashbery's resistances are
more ironic; while he uses his own position as a colonial figure
in And the Stars Were Shining, he hardly suggests a plan of
resistance to it. Instead, he operates more like an unambivalent
Derek Walcott (if such can be imagined), by embracing all the
voices that course through him. Of course he has less need to
resist dominant voices than does Yamanaka; after all, he IS a
dominant voice. He would agree with Walcott who, in "The Muse of
History," writes contra Glissant's attack on assimilation: "But
the tribe in bondage learned to fortify itself by cunning assimilation of the
religion of the Old World. What seemed to be
surrender was redemption. What seemed the loss of tradition was
its renewal. What seemed the death of faith was its rebirth"
(42).